If our previous installment of "landscape and capitalism" was a "meandering" or
"zigzag" (*), then this one is going in circles. In two of the most devastating
psychogeographic film projects ever undertaken in and around the British
capital, Christopher Petit joins Iain Sinclair for his circumnavigation of
London along the M25, while Patrick Keiller follows Robinson's spiralling
expeditions around the city center. But "London Orbital" is not the portrait of
a road: it is a stream of hallucinations that leak onto it. And "London" is not
a journey through a city: it is time travel by means of urban exploration. Both
films meet through the writers they choose as witnesses to their findings, and
they share a dark, romantic materialism that, outside the films of Guy Debord,
has rarely ever articulated itself in cinema. "It is a journey to the end of
the world," opens "London". "To enter it is to enter dead time," "London
Orbital" echoes. Yet these films don't just denounce the terror of motorized
transportation or lament the disappearance of an entire city. In the end, each
of them will reveal itself as an elaborated, apocalyptic, absurdist joke not
only about London, but about the practice of filmmaking and storytelling itself.